DISA Leads Consolidation of Defense Data Centers The Defense Information Systems Agency will take the lead in the Defense Department’s plan to consolidate hundreds of data centers. In a report on its consolidation plans, DOD said the Air Force, Army and Defense Logistics Agency have adopted a “DISA first” strategy, looking to DISA as the first choice to provide application and data hosting. DOD said the “DISA first” policy will reduce the need for local contractor support and reduce the energy and real estate footprint at the local and regional levels. “Hosting Enterprise Applications within DISA [Enterprise Computing Centers] will shift IT operations focus from infrastructure management to service management model outlined in Federal Cloud Computing strategy,” the report says. DOD operated 772 data centers in 2010, but has already shut down 55 of them. While the department did not say how many centers it plans to close, it estimated savings will total more than $1 billion annually by 2016. However, budget cuts and uncertainties threaten to slow the consolidation plan. “Consolidation requires an investment in labor, new and more efficient hardware, upgrades to computer facilities, and increased operating costs when some legacy systems run in parallel with new systems,” the report says. The DOD consolidation effort is part of a governmentwide drive to reduce the number of federal data centers.